Real Housewife Kelly Bensimon has teamed up with designer Jen Mascali to observe the 10th anniversary of 9/11... with a tote bag. In her touching letter that accompanies the $240 product, Bensimon explains that she's "totally crazy for handbags." more ›

Would you eat a cow, and then wear its skin? Food just went from farm to table to your closet (we await the inevitable moniker for this group of foodie fashionistas: foodista?). According to the NY Post, Marlow & Sons in Williamsburg is selling leather goods constructed from the tanned hides of the locally sourced cows and pigs that make it to their menu. more ›

The over three year long saga behind Kirsten Dunst's stolen Balenciaga bag is finally coming to an end! In 2007 the actress was staying at the SoHo Grand hotel during the filming of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, when the bag and some other items went missing. James Jimenez and Jarrod Beinerman were pinned for the crime, and Beinerman has been paying the price behind bars, while Jimenez was only sentenced this week, after years of courtroom drama. more ›

The NYCLU filed a lawsuit yesterday on behalf of a Brooklyn man who says the NYPD has stopped him in the subway and searched his bag an excessive number of times because he looks Middle Eastern. 32-year-old Jangir Sultan was born in Brooklyn, where he currently resides, but he accuses NYPD officers of racial profiling, stopping him 21 times over three years. Police began searching subway riders' bags at checkpoints in 2005 in the wake of the London subway bombings, but the department insists the checks are race-neutral and conducted randomly. more ›

An Army soldier was arrested at MacArthur airport on Long Island Saturday morning after she tried to bring a loaded revolver on a flight to San Antonio, Texas. The piece was not Army issue and 38-year-old Spc. Vonda Collier, who has been stationed for the past year at Camp Liberty near Baghdad, did not have a New York license to carry it. She was arrested and charged with criminal possession of a weapon after it was found during a routine baggage check. Collier is on bereavement leave to attend her mother's funeral in Texas; police say she was visiting relatives on Long Island but her father tells Newsday she has no family here. And last Thursday a man was arrested at MacArthur for trying to bring a pipe bomb on the plane home to Vegas. He says he just wanted to "cause a giant smoke cloud, a flash of light and hopefully a loud noise." more ›

Security guards have stopped searching bags belonging to people attending a biweekly movie night in Tompkins Square Park after a group of 15 activists protested Wednesday night. The Villager was at the scene, where critics of the bag checks had vowed to strip naked to ironically facilitate the security searches. Mercifully, it didn’t come to that. Josh Boyd, a co-founder of the free movie series, called off the search “because it was upsetting people.” Jeffrey Rothman, a civil rights lawyer who attended as a legal observer, sounded a triumphant note as audience members filed freely into a screening of Better Off Dead: “Rights that are not asserted wither away.” [Photo: Villager/Jefferson Siegel] more ›

DOS police lieutenant John Fitzgerald is a 24-year vet who's better known as the guy who ended up carrying Naomi Campbell's bag when she reported for day two of her community service last year. And now he's stepping out of the model's shadow. more ›